Bound for Vietnam (22 page)
Then mine host produced someone who spoke English to entertain me: (or find out about me) a young man who was the manager of the government-owned hotel across the street. He was the only one on duty, so he kept his eye on his hotel foyer from where we sat. Toi said that his hotel had ten rooms which cost ten dollars each, but that their main business was import and export. Strange business for a hotel.
From the time that I had arrived in Bai Chay I had been forced to listen to the propaganda broadcast that boomed from a loud speaker in the nearby public square. I asked Toi what it was. ‘It’s government news,’ he said. Whether you want it or not, I thought. The Vietnamese were apparently as much into this form of entertainment/torture as the Chinese.
A little later I fell into bed and was fast asleep at once. But I was woken shortly afterwards. I had thought I’d found a nice quiet place, but Vietnamese on holiday proved to be just as noisy as the Chinese. They shouted, yahooed and slammed doors in the middle of the night and the disturbance reverberated up the stone staircase as though it was an echo chamber. Then someone threw on the landing light as well as the light in the room opposite mine and left them on all night. My room had a glass door. I got up to hang a blanket over it. At half past five in the morning the propaganda merchant started screaming and yelling over the loud speaker again and after that I got no more sleep. I was not amused.
In the café Dung Dung Fuk I enjoyed a traditional Vietnamese breakfast, while trying not to watch the dishes being washed in the gutter at the front of the establishment. Most small places had no water and the only running water available to them was in the gutters. Breakfast consisted of a big bowl of thick noodles mixed with whatever had been left over from last night’s dinner and topped with a tasty sauce, a squeeze of juice from a tiny green lime and a dash of chopped chilli. It was one of the best breakfasts I’d had while travelling and it only cost a few cents. I was still feeling sleepy, but some great, strong heart-starting Vietnamese coffee soon fixed that. Then the itinerant butcher called at the café. He carried his wares in an old, cane basket which he put on the ground and everyone came and handled the meat. I went for a walk.
Having heard that jewellery shops were the places to change money quietly, I patronised one in the main street where a genial woman gave me a good rate of exchange. Next I went in search of the wharf from where the boat sailed down the coast to Haiphong. Vietnam is a long and narrow country that lies between the Tropic of Cancer and the Equator, and, although it is only fifty kilometres wide in places, it stretches for over 1700 kilometres along the Indochinese Peninsula and has borders with Cambodia, Laos and China as well as 3260 kilometres of coastline.
At the crossroads of Bai Chay’s two main streets, I noticed a big round communal well surrounded by cement where women washed themselves, their clothes, their dishes and their babies. Wandering on I went into many places that I probably should not have, was offered a ride on a sampan around the harbour and found the ferry that went over to the island across the bay, but I didn’t find the wharf.
Although almost no one spoke English, everyone I met was sociable. The hotel owner’s mother tried very hard to talk to me. She really wanted to get to know me. On my second morning, deeply concerned about my health, she took my hand, looked intently into my face, and asked me if I had slept better. When I said that I had, she seemed genuinely pleased. I now wished I’d spent my entire time travelling in Vietnam.
But Vietnam also had its drawbacks. Rubbish abounded in the streets of Bai Chay and mean-looking dogs scavenged through piles of it in the gutters. And once more I was appalled at the mindless cruelty I saw inflicted on animals. One day I watched two poor live birds, with an awful hopeless look in their eyes, being dragged along the street as a toy on a string by a child.
I had slept better the second night, but there was no way of getting away from the morning’s harangue. It battered its way through ear plugs and shut windows and seeped into your subconscious. Sounding like a loud barrage of exhortations and demands, it continued non-stop, hammering the senses in a violent assault. The locals seemed oblivious to it. Maybe you got used to it like you did the call to prayer in Muslim countries. Downstairs, in the room open to the street at the front of the hotel where the owners sat in the evening, it almost drowned out the television. The harangue worked in one way though; it had me up by seven o’clock every morning. Even at this early hour the street below me was alive with activity.
At last I located the wharf. It was a rusting metal pier that was punctuated by holes big enough to give vistas of the water below. The boats tied to it were not much better. They looked precariously dilapidated and a particularly decrepit wreck of wood and iron turned out to be the one on which I was to sail. Myriads of small boats plied the water between the mainland and the islands around the bay, and there was a constant coming and going of sampans and bigger wooden boats shaped like Chinese junks, complete with children, dogs and pot plants – one even sported a small tree.
After three days in Bai Chay, I said my farewells at the hotel and climbed onto a motorbike. I had discovered that this was the only means of transport here, apart from the use of your feet. 1000 dong, or ten cents, got you a big thank you, as well as the price of a ride anywhere around town. I was getting good at managing motorbike transport, which I once heard referred to as ‘transpiration’. Did that mean inspirational transport? The riders here went very slowly and sedately when I was on the pillion. I hoped this was because they had learned that tourists who were unused to Asian road rules had more delicate nervous systems and not in deference to my great age.
In the old stone building that served as the waiting room and ticket office on the wharf, I paid the fare to Haiphong – much to the amusement of the female officer who wrote my name and nationality in the tattered school exercise book that housed the official foreigners’ dossier. I wondered why she found it so funny that I was travelling by ship and why tabs were kept on foreigners. Was it in case one went missing, possibly drowned? The ticket to Haiphong cost 50,000 dong, which sounds like a fortune, but was only five dollars. I rattled down the pier, passed the two ticket collectors who tried on my hat with much hilarity, and clattered onto the boat.
Our ancient craft set sail and lumbered along hugging the coast. In the three and a half hours it took to reach Haiphong we never left sight of the shore, which, in view of the vessel’s age and condition, seemed a very wise precaution. I sat on a hard, shiny wooden bench. The sides of the boat were lined by windows which contained no such refinement as glass. A pretty Vietnamese student seated herself opposite me and began to practise her English. She told me she was too young to marry yet, but that she would do so when she was twenty-five and then she would have three children. I asked her if the number of children allowed was government controlled and she said no, but that the ideal was two. I read that despite long years of war, famine and mass emigration, Vietnam is one of the most populous countries in the world and that, in a land a little smaller than Italy, there are over sixty-four million people, half of whom are under twenty years of age. When I discovered that the student sitting with me was also studying Chinese, I gave her my Chinese phrase book. I had no intention of using it again.
Despite the decrepitude of our antiquated boat, it still ran to first and second classes, which were divided by a narrow walkway through its centre. In this passage-way a young woman set up a low wooden table and several microscopic stools, produced a kerosene-powered stove, laid out an array of jars, bowls and bottles containing various edibles and cooked and fed passengers who came and sat down with her two or three at a time. It looked a very sociable and agreeable manner of dining. All over Vietnam I was to see women arrive with two baskets on a shoulder pole and set up these instant portable restaurants on the street.
The boat trip beat travelling by over-crowded bus on the terrible roads and the scenery was wonderful. For the first hour we passed slowly among the thousands of mountain islets, each surrounded by a flotilla of boats, which rise like the Loch Ness monster out of the sea over an area of 1500 square kilometres. Their fantastic shapes and the wondrous grottos they contain have given them their unusual names such as ‘the unicorn’ and ‘fighting cocks’.
Haiphong had been given bad press in my travel guide, but I found it extremely acceptable. The moral of this is that you shouldn’t believe everything you read in travel books. Haiphong is charming. About 100 kilometres east of Hanoi, it was just a sleepy market town until the French arrived. Now it is the major port of the north. Haiphong has witnessed the coming and going of many conquerors, the last being the Japanese, and it was heavily bombed by the Americans in their war with Vietnam. Full of interesting, old French colonial-era buildings, it has no traffic to speak of except that which is propelled by pedal power.
I took a cyclo, the first pedicab I had seen in this country, from the boat to the train station. The streets of Haiphong are wide, it was a heavenly, sunny day with a gentle breeze and it was altogether delightful to be pushed about in something that resembled a hybrid of a wheel barrow, a bath chair and an oversized pram. That is, after I had overcame the initial feeling that I looked a complete fool in it. Vietnamese cyclos have seats that tilt back, so that you either have to perch uncomfortably on their edges, or loll back like the Sheik of Araby. I am a loller by nature, so I had no difficulty with this part. The problem was that the cyclo had no sides or top, only wooden arm rests, and I was projected out in front of the vehicle like a roo bar to cushion the driver if we hit anything. I felt like the ultimate air bag. This was not too bad here, where the traffic was light, but later in Saigon it became nerve-racking. I would see doom approaching me in the form of a thousand whizzing motorbikes as the rider pushed me, his buffer, feet first across a wide, busy intersection against the flow of the oncoming traffic. Bikes would graze past and ricochet off me as the traffic and I came together in the middle of the road in a panic-inducing
danse macabre.
I noted that cyclo riders were invariably young (maybe they don’t live long enough to get old) and cheerful. They should be,
they
didn’t have a lot to worry about!
The Haiphong train station was an airy colonial building and there were no crowds or barricades. The cyclo rider carried my bags into the station and waited to see that I was able to buy a ticket before he left. At the counter an obliging woman served me and I met a young New Zealander – the first westerner I had come across since Yanshu. The train to Hanoi, with its cheerful blue and yellow carriages, stood alongside the station platform, but it was several hours before departure time, so I looked after Tony’s bags while he walked to the market to buy provisions.
He returned with a delicious stick of French bread and cheese, salami, pork paste and fruit, all of which had cost two dollars. We bought drinks at the kiosk bar in the main hall where the locals waited and moved into the ‘Tourist Waiting Room’ – a place set aside from the proletariat – to have a picnic. The Vietnamese government also discriminates against foreigners. They had tourist prices, a device probably copied from the Chinese, but at least they offered you something extra for it. The Tourist Waiting Room, which was situated on one side of the station building, was not very big, but this was something I now appreciated. It was also extremely comfortable, with good-quality leather armchairs set around a large coffee table that was graced by a tea set and thermos. A luggage storage unit covered all of one wall. An antique wooden cabinet with bevelled edges and an elegant patina, it would have looked great in any house. A female guard kept us company in the waiting room. She was soon joined by many of her friends, workers in railway uniforms, and they had beer all round – several times. I hoped none of them was driving the train.
But the train station had no toilet. You had to walk across the road to a public convenience in the square which was
al
fresco
in every way. Not only was it roofless and open to the elements, but it had no partitions for privacy. There were not even any holes in the ground. You squatted on a sloping tiled floor behind which a ditch ran away downhill.
The ticket seller had sworn that there was nothing available on this train except hard-class seats, so Tony and I boarded the train with hard-class tickets. But the carriage our seats were in actually turned out to be soft class. Bliss. Everyone had a seat and no luggage clogged the aisle. All surplus baggage was in the conductor’s den. He seemed to be running an unofficial freight business on the side. He also seemed to be giving his friends free or subsidised rides; three of them were squeezed in with the freight.
A gaggle of French tourists, who had obviously mis-spent several hours waiting for the train in the pursuit of the grape in some hostelry, were seated near us. They had not been terribly attractive to begin with, but as the booze got to their bladders and they rocked and rolled down the carriage in search of the toilet, they became ludicrous. One man looked like a dim-witted dancing bear and a woman wore shorts. She did not have the figure to wear them anywhere, but she should have been forcibly restrained from wearing them in Vietnam where this fashion is seen as flagrantly immoral. It often appeared to me that many tourists on short package trips did not bother to find out anything about the culture of the countries they were to visit – unlike most individual travellers who need to do so for self-preservation.
Darkness soon fell and I couldn’t see much from the train windows. A metal trolley trundled through the carriage aisle dispensing tea from big tin kettles and two hours after leaving Haiphong we crossed a massive bridge over the Red River. Then we were running into Hanoi.
